elfsinarelm

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CATS or What Is This RPG or Setting The Table

So I just heard about CATS courtesy of the good folks in the PlusOneExp discord server. CATS was written by Patrick O'Leary for the 2016 200 Word RPG Challenge.

It's nice and short (200 words even) and it's a compelling formula for the classic What Is This TTRPG segment that warrants a page at the front of every good RPG book.

I find it particularly interesting that this is imagined as a micro-RPG in its own right, a table activity for the start of game night that sets out to address what I have always found to be the most painful aspect of playing any TTRPG (besides tedious and arcane character creation rituals – I'm looking at you 5e PHB 👀): the friction that arises from players having discordant, conflicting, contradictory or incompatible expectations during play.

We can formulate the basic strucure of CATS in a variety of ways: Concept/Aim/Tone/Subject Matter, What/Where/When/Who/Why/How, Premise/Overview/Goals/What You Need, etc. all of which can be applied in two immediate directions:

In a What Is This RPG section, these are just codified methods for teaching the player/reader (more of my thoughts on the player/reader here) how to read and communicate everything that comes next in a way that's both more focused than a blurb (which might basically constitute the Concept/Premise/Hook) and more comprehensive than an elevator pitch.

As a launchpad for table play, these structures guide the conversation to establish the pillars of the shared fiction, and I especially appreciate CATS for the fact that it ends on Subject Matter. It could be the consequence of a tortured acronym, but having set the stage in every other way it seems appropriate to hop into safety tools as the final as the final negotiation before play, once all context is provided but nothing is yet set in stone.

That's all he wrote on CATS.

In THE PERILOUS PEAR & PLUM PIES OF PUDWICK I wrote a conversation guide to the meat of the adventure on pg. 11, following an introductory segment of the game that functions as a session 1 prologue of sorts before delving into the hexflower "dungeon" microsetting, inciting incident et al. It's interesting for me to look back at the way I structured this from the perspective of CATS.

If you're curious about TPPAPPOP and want a sneak peak of what you can expect, here's that segment from pg. 11, Inside The Tree:

Resources: the insects of the tree live in darkness and have varying weird diets – you might decide that tracking resources like light and food is important, or maybe at this scale adventurers can survive on the honeydew, leaves and strange meats that the insects eat. Sights and Sounds: footsteps might sound like earthquakes, voices like distant thunder. What are the twitches and mannerisms of the chittering language of insects? How does artificial light disturb the denizens of the tree? Setting and Tone: to adjust the game to your group's preference, you might lean into the existential conflict of intruding on and potentially dooming these fledgling societies, or downplay the crawling horror of an insect world to allow its cuter side to shine through.

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[elfsinarelm]

LT Reads: The Wildsea RPG

We gotta talk about this game, y’all.

I’ve played and run a lot of this in the last year. It’s got such a unique setting. Here’s the basics.

Once upon a time, the Verdancy happened: an apocalypse of accelerated growth and acidic poison called crezzerine.

But that was then. This is now.

Now, ships with chainsaw prows and leviathan heart engines cut through waves of treetops. Their wakes disappear as the rapid growth repairs broken branches. Mutated wolves and foxes leap from limb to limb.

You build a character with three main elements: Bloodline, Origin, and Post.

Bloodline is what species you are. Maybe you’re a mothryn, recently emerged from your chrysalis. Maybe you’re an ektus, longing for desert sands. Maybe you’re a tzelicrae whose spiders have just finished sewing a new skin.

(Yeah, this is a weird game).

Origin is where you’re from. Did you grow up on one of the few solid landmasses in the trees? Were you preserved in amber for centuries and now have to contend with a foreign landscape? Did you grow up on the waves themselves, with a family on a fleet of ships?

Post is the sort of role you fill on a ship. Maybe you fight with guns. Maybe you brew strange concoctions that heal the soul. Maybe you carry the mail.

Each of these three elements is made up of aspects. Each aspect gives you a specific flavor, and each has a track associated with it. These tracks can be used for special abilities when specified, or they can be marked to designate injury done to your wildsailor.

Tracks in general are the way to measure progress, whether that be in journeys, in combat, or in projects.

You build your dice pool with Edges, Skills, and then any relevant aspects, resources, or environmental advantages you might have. The Firefly (GM) imposes cut if there are factors making the thing you’re trying to achieve more difficult. Your outcome is measured on a scale from triumph to conflict to failure. And doubles means a twist comes into play!

That’s to say nothing of ship-building!

I really cannot emphasize enough how fun and low-prep this game is. And guess what?

The basic rules are free.

There’s an expansion launching on Kickstarter soon for airships and submersibles.

Check it out!!

[elfsinarelm]

Make a robotic Paladin who follows the Oath of the Three Laws.

[elfsinarelm]

TTRPGs I Love

as i finally get to play more TTRPGs beyond D&D, i've found some games i really like and i wanted to recommend three of them today (in no particular order)! despite the fact i love it, anyone who follows me will have played D&D, so that won't be on this list.

Alone Among The Stars

sometimes you simply cannot find people to play with, but that doesn't mean there aren't great games out there! all you need for Alone Among The Stars is a d6 and a deck of cards, and you use these tools to tell a story about a character travelling alone through the depths of space. there's also a two player version i haven't played. my current ongoing game is about an android, sent out alone to explore unknown planets, learning that she's more human than she thinks. and the level of structure in Alone Among The Stars is perfect for giving me a story that still surprises me without taking away from the overall vision i had for the character and her arc!

Lasers and Feelings

i absolutely love lasers and feelings and i've gushed about it before. another sci-fi TTRPG, lasers & feelings is a fun improv-heavy game where your character has a single number stat to remember. depending on the size of your number, you're either better at lasers (logic) or feelings. from there, it's all just working with the other players and your GM to have fun sci-fi hijinks and adventures! ran this game for a few members of my D&D party a while back when we didn't have enough players for a full session, and the character setup so easily creates fun, memorable characters that you can just be stupid about. and from a GM perspective, i loved the little rolling tables for creating scenarios. (i'm also working on my own fantasy L&F hack at the moment! very excited)

Urban Shadows

urban shadows 2e isn't out yet, and it's the quickstart that i played with when i ran this campaign, but even the incomplete rules made for an excellent game. urban shadows is a PBTA game system that stood out to me because of the dark, mysterious urban fantasy setting and the incredibly cool character playbook options. i've not gotten to run a full campaign, and i have to admit that the low-prep style of urban shadows GMing isn't exactly for me, but i absolutely adore PBTA games, i love the setting and flavour of urban shadows specifically, and i'll definitely be going back to play for more than a few sessions of this game

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‘Forest knight/ancient guardian’ won this week’s poll, and I don’t know, I liked the narrative angle of a human knight who ended up in the fae monarch’s service centuries ago? :’)

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Do you play Monster of the Week?

Do you have a hard time looking at your playbook with all the moves you didn't or won't take because your brain is weird?

Do you wish you could add a picrew on your playbook?

Do you have a homebrew playbook you'd like to make?

Well, I've made a Google Doc template!

I made this template for all my characters, as well as for a my homebrew The Extraterrestrial. It also helps me keep track of facts I've created in canon.

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As creators, we cannot help but plant the seeds of our inner truth, even if we're unable to see it in the moment.

I say this because, many times, I wrote about being trans masc before I realized that's who I was.

I think the clearest example of this is The Doll, one of the characters you can play in Our Haunt. I wrote the first version of the game in 2019.

Our Haunt is a creepy-cozy game of a found family of ghosts, and the haunted rooms they have claimed for themselves. You decide if you want to attempt to reconnect to the painful memories of when you were alive, or create new ones with your new family.

Here's the description of The Doll playbook:

The Doll

You wake up feeling constricted, suffocated. The world around you is suddenly so large, wide, overwhelming. But your body is not your own, and your small voice is strange and terrifying. You’ve woken up in the body of a doll, and don’t remember how you got here.

Did you come into this body willingly? Or did someone force you into this strange vessel? Your best chance at leaving this prison is by working with the other ghosts of your Haunt.

I wrote the doll to be any kind of haunted toy really, not necessarily a femme doll. But looking at some of the character creation options, it's crystal clear to me in hindsight. The Doll speaks to my experiences as being conditioned by society to perform femme. I was assigned female at birth, and so female I must perform by exacting standards, and fail miserably all my life.

I add additional themes, narrative and emotional layers to explore, for each playbook. For The Doll, I didn't question at the time why I thought lies, infantilization, and bodily transformation were the right themes to go with. I mostly write from a place of intuition, that looks like stream of consciousness writing to the casual observer.

There are many telling things: such as a look option of porcelain falling from my face, a memory of a mirror showing a dark reflection behind me, the yearning to make my body more pleasing to me.

Of course, as the Doll, you have access to moves like tell a lie someone else wants to believe and change your body in a spooky manner. There's a lot more in the playbook, oh boy.

In one of those "Rae should have realized something was going on" moments, a similar incident would occur almost every time I playtested Our Haunt with folks. Different folks! Different groups! And almost every single time, a trans person would pick up the Doll and say, "It's amazing how well you captured the trans experience in this playbook."

And I, utterly clueless, would respond along the lines of, "Wow, that's so strange, I'm not trans!"

One time I said that, and the discord call got very quiet. There were a few seconds of an incredibly distinctive pause. At the time, I wondered if I had said something offensive, by misspeaking in a trans space (hah!). But now I realize that at least one person (if not all of them) were thinking, "Ah, an egg. Well, who are we to crack it before it's ready?"

The thing is, I played the Doll a lot. I even remember thinking, "It's funny how this is the easiest playbook for me to play, I'm not drawn to this archetype at all" (HAH!!)

The Doll is just one example of my heart and soul finding its way to express itself before I could stumble unto the truth. I think it's one of the many amazing gifts that art, and the act of its creation, can give us:

The gift of the truth, even before we're ready for it. A moment in the past, surrounded by layers of clarity, waiting to be unearthed by our future selves.

I'm very proud of Our Haunt, and it's the first of my games to actually get published and printed! It came out earlier this year, and is one of the brightest lights in what has been a dark time. I can't believe you can find my game alongside other wonderful titles by Possum Creek Games!

If you do pick it up, I give you full permission to flip through The Doll and have a little chuckle, at my expense. I promise I'm a very good sport at being such a tough egg to crack.

P.S. The Doll, and all the art of Our Haunt, was created by Habil Firdaus.

[elfsinarelm]

overly specific dnd meme that could also be about godhood if you think about it

[elfsinarelm]

Fantasy stories should have more “what do you mean you don’t do X” things in compare and contrast of cultures. Like the differences between peoples aren’t the stuff they show off as “These Are Our Culture :)” things, fucking everyone has food and music and folk tales, but the things they’ve always assumed that everyone has, and are baffled to discover that they don’t.

The people who are always barefoot are baffled that humans don’t have a wash basin at their front door where people can wash their feet before stepping inside?? Do they just walk in with their dirty feet? The fuck do you mean you take your shoes off?

Humans don’t have small baby-sized spellbooks for toddlers who just learned to read, so they can safely learn to practice tiny cute and harmless, age-appropriate magic spells before progressing to more mature and demanding spells? What, do they just throw teenagers completely unprepared into the arcane - hold the fuck up, is that why human sorceror mortality is so fucking high?

Dwarves who have always wondered why the entrance to human residences is so fucking big, why do you need to take up such a large area for a door that’s just there to lead downstairs to the underground halls? Are the timber walls really as thick as a human is tall? What for? And once one of them gets invited to a human house to stay and rest, nobody ever fucking believes her: That’s not the entrance, that’s the whole fucking house. 100% of the human house is aboveground, there is no tunnel to the underground levels. They might have a single storage room down there, but the aboveground section is so fucking big because that’s the whole house.

This post was brought to you by: People who butter their bread and who had no idea that there are people who put mayonnaise on their bread, and people who put mayo on their bread and had no idea about people who put butter on their bread discovering that the other kind of people exist.

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The actual last Class Cheat Sheets! Thank you to @theemucat and @theheirofashandfire for spotting the absence of the Rogue and Ranger classes, respectively. I’m going to go with the excuse the internet kindly provided me and say they rolled a 30+ on their stealth roll :P

The Little Book of Level 1 is now back on the google drive (see my pinned post), where you can also find “Everything you need to know to survive your first game with the 5th edition” and “Conditions, conditions, conditions!”.

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imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

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[elfsinarelm]

If you want to write something for November, but you don’t want it to be fifty thousand words long, I have a suggestion:

Step 1: Read a bunch of 200 word RPGs until your brain turns to soup – https://200wordrpg.github.io/

Step 2: Once your brain-meats have been appropriately primed (see above), write your own 200 word RPG.

Step 3: Reblog this post and append your 200 word RPG.

(Please restrict non-200-word-RPG commentary to replies and tags; anybody who creeps the reblogs should see a solid wall of nothing but 200 word RPGs.)

[elfsinarelm]

Following my basic rules cheat sheet (also tagged ‘For DND newbies’), here are the Artificer, Barbarian, Bard and Blood Hunter cheat sheet. These are super basic things meant to be printed in A5. PDF version can be made available on demand. Still no ID because I have no idea how the fuck to describe this more than I just did.

Please reblog if you find this useful :)

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Hello, I'm Penflower Ink, and I created the Four Points RPG System. What is Four Points? Four Points is a simple but highly customisable TTRPG rules system. Here is the core mechanic: Whenever a Character wants to do something important to the game/story, their Player has two options: - Spend Energy Points from the most relevant Stat pool in exchange for varying degrees of guaranteed success, - OR roll 1d6 with a base 50/50 chance of success. Everything else in the SRD is pretty much optional! When building a Four Points TTRPG, you can incorporate and adapt as much or as little of the additional rules as you like. What are the Four Points? Four Points is so named because it focuses on 4 aspects of TTRPGs: - Characters, - Narrative, - Player Agency, - Customisation.

Where can I find the Four Points SRD? The SRD is on itch.io, available as a Pay What You Want document. Four Points RPG SRD What Four Points TTRPGs are available? The following is a list of all the Four Points games I have designed, written and illustrated, in chronological order: Loot the Plutes: an industrial fantasy game about swashbuckling, magic and wealth redistribution in a capitalist hellscape. Guarden: an experimental micro-RPG about being an elusive gnome protecting your patch of green. Outward Bound: a utopian science-fiction game about space exploration, inter-species cooperation and weird anomalies. Goblins & Grimoires: a retro video-game inspired fantasy game about being goblins trying to learn magic. The Creature's Features: a setting agnostic game / supplement about observing and cataloguing weird creatures, such as aliens, mythological beasts and cryptids. Come Rain Come Shine: a GM-less storytelling and role-playing game about creating a solarpunk community of animalfolk, and helping it flourish. (Dinosauria Expansion: lets you play as dinosaurs!) QuestFellows: a GM-less storytelling and role-playing game about forming an Adventurer's Guild and going on quests in a high fantasy setting. I hope that if the Four Points system - or any of the game descriptions above - sound interesting to you, you'll check them out. I'll be adding a bunch of Community Copies to each game, and I add more with every purchase made. Thanks for reading! - Tom / Penflower

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guys Hasbro is making toys that transform from d20s to D&D monsters

guys

they’re more than meets the die